Page 56 of Most Likely to Match
Lauren huffs, the first sign of true annoyance. “Okay,” she says, her tone clipped. “I’ll email you with our class schedule, and you can let me know what works best for the both of you. And he has to RSVP for the reunion,” she says pointedly.
“Great,” I say with fake levity. “Thanks so much, Lauren. I’m looking forward to it.”
Even though she ends the call, I pick my phone up and set it down a little harder than necessary, the closest thing I have to slamming a land line anymore.
“Chloe,” he says behind me, the words delivered the same way a dogged action hero might saywhat the fuck?when the evil villain just won’t die. I wheel the computer chair back around to him. “Why?” He leans on my desk, his hands pressed so hard into the particleboard, they’ve turned white.
I walk around the desk, pull his arms around me, hold him tight around his waist. “I don’t know,” I say quietly into the soft fabric of his shirt. It smells like him, warm and safe. “I guess…”
I hold him tighter, his body both soft and hard against mine. There are bruises and scrapes underneath his clothes because he’s a thirty-year-old man who still skateboards. There are scars on the backs of his legs and upper arms, straight razor-thin lines. Some I remember from before, but that I still feel responsible for, not because I believe I am that powerful, but because aren’t we all a little bit responsible for the pain suffered by the people we love?
And maybe that’s the why, the answer he’s looking for. Because I love him. I loved him. Because those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t love, match; until they can. Maybe I’ve played around with my algorithm for so long now that it’s become a part of me. Or maybe it was always in me. A line of code, like DNA, that was glitchy, and bug-filled, until him.
I am still ill-equipped, the responsibility of Dean’s heart too fragile even when I hold it between my arms like this.
More than anything, I want to walk back into that building holding his hand.
“I guess I thought it was the right thing to do,” I say.
Dean takes my face in his hands. His fingertips hold the base of my skull, my jaw fitting into his palms like we were carved from the same tree. “Oh Chloe,” he says fondly, exasperated. Happy.
He presses his lips to my forehead and keeps them there. Long after he’s gone home for the day, I still feel him there. The weight, the pressure, invisible to everyone but me.
11
DEAN
The shift is subtle. Measured best by the lack of space between us when we walk down the street, the casual way she drops my name when she talks to her dad on the phone. It’s there the first time she invites me over to her apartment to sleep over and we’re too tired for anything but sleep, but I still wake up with her hand on my stomach.
It’s subtle, until it isn’t. The morning we’re supposed to speak to Lauren’s class as alumni of Don Head, Chloe sends a series of messages about her ETA to pick me up, asking whether I want coffee, a breakfast sandwich, what I’m wearing— not in the fun way but in thewhat should I wear?way. They aren’t much different from what her usual morning texts are like, except the tone and pace of them are frantic. As we walk into the school, going through the front doors near the main office rather than the doors by the student lot, on the other side of the school, Chloe no longer brushes her hips and hands against mine. She’s silent. Not like she has nothing to say, but like she simply cannot say them.
Normally I’d be equipped to deal with this. I’d stop her from picking at her nails, ask if we could watch the lava lamp app together—something she was embarrassed to use in front of me the first time— but I don’t have it in me this time.
There’s a shift in me, too. Because she reaches for me as we wait in the office, but I don’t reach back. It’s different here, during the day instead of at a night market, in the building instead of out on the field, knowing we’ll see Lauren, talk to her, and that I will have to pretend everything is fine. That’s the thing. It could be fine, I just can’t process it right now.
My body doesn’t know the difference between time and space; that primordial part of my brain is screaming again, trying to protect me like it always has.
So when Lauren comes to collect us, hugging Chloe like they’re old friends, I read into it. When she smiles coyly over her shoulder at me, my skin crawls. Lauren talks to us knowingly about pregnancy, though she hasn’t asked if either of us are parents, so I’m unsure what she thinks we’d know.
For her faults, Lauren seems like a good teacher. Engaged and excited, though her energy seems wasted on the lethargy and ennui of teenagers. She’s better suited to an elementary or even primary classroom.
As always, Chloe somehow pulls it together and puts on a clutch performance in front of a bunch of seemingly uninterested sixteen-year-olds. By the time she’s finished, explaining how she got into coding (it was fun) and started a business (it kind of happened by accident), at least half the class has leaned forward in their seats, and three students ask questions.
But when it’s my turn, I know I get the words out. Distantly, I can hear myself, but there’s one too many similarities for the panic in my body and brain to handle. It’s not any one thing. I’ve stood in front of a classroom of students before; in front of Chloe; I’ve been under pressure.
It’s the combination of this place and these women and the riot in my heart when I look at her, of feelings I thought I had under control. It’s wondering what she and Lauren are whispering about while at the same time knowing how upset she’d be if she knew that still, aftereverything, this sliver of distrust sits between us, a nuisance rather than a pain, but present, nonetheless.
Chloe frowns at me when I’m finished. “Are you okay?” she asks. I’m worried I’m sweating through my shirt. “Why don’t you walk around a bit?” She rests her hand on my forearm, and I try not to snatch it away. “I’ll meet you down in the foyer in five minutes.”
I take the stairs at the end of the hall down to the first floor of the school, from the English department to science. A few classrooms are in use, students packing up bags and teachers calling out instructions in tones that demonstrate they know no one is listening. It’s almost comforting to see how many things have stayed the same. Summer school sucks, no matter what generation you’re from.
I trail my fingers along empty lockers as I take the main hallway slowly toward the foyer. Students begin to pour out of classrooms, though not at the same volume or intensity as I’d expect during the regular school year. When I was a student, especially an underclassman, we all seemed soadult. A twelfth grader seemed like aman. Now I’m not sure I can tell the difference between a freshman and a senior.
“Dean? Dean Westlake, is that you?” Standing at the end of the hallway, a tall white woman with white hair peers at me through thick red-framed glasses.
“Mrs. Rivkin?”
My high school art and photography teacher somehow looks fifteen years older while also not having changed a bit. She wears familiar faded Converse sneakers and paint-stained jeans and a Doors t-shirt. She smiles big. “It’s so good to see you.”
